Mile
Zero

Every year at the Super Bowl, for many years now, it's traditional for GoDaddy to remind everyone that they're a horrible company run by a creepy, elephant-hunting misogynist. This year was no different. The good news is that I was working on the Soul Society website on Sunday, so I didn't actually see any of their ads. The bad news is that Soul Society is hosted on GoDaddy (cue ironic record scratch).

The thing about GoDaddy is that they are fractally gross: everything about them gets more distasteful the more you dig into it. There is no part of their operation that does not make you want to take a shower after interacting with them--neither the advertising, nor the sales experience, nor the admin panels, and certainly not the actual hosting.

It should be enough that the company was run, for years, by a horrible, horrible person who kills elephants for sport, supports torturing Guantanamo Bay detainees, and is a relentless self-promoter. You should look no further than its incredibly sexist advertising, which manages to be both repulsive and badly produced. The fact that they originally came out in favor of SOPA just rounds out the list of offensive behavior.

But if, despite all those reasons, you go to sign up for an account (as many people, including many of my students, end up doing), chances are that you'll end up overpaying due to an intentionally-confusing sales process. The upsell actually doesn't stop at the first purchase. Every time I interact with the site, I'm forced to wade through a morass of confusing ads and sale links masquerading as admin panels. Everything on GoDaddy leads to a shopping cart.

GoDaddy also parcels up its crappy service into smaller pieces, so they can force you to pay more for stuff that you should get for free. As an example, I have an urbanartistry.org e-mail address for when we need a webmaster link on the site. For a while, it was a separate mailbox, which meant that I never checked it. Then I missed a bunch of e-mails from other UA directors, and decided to redirect the e-mail address to my personal account. On most mail providers, this is a free service. On GoDaddy, you can set up a forward, but an actual alias costs an additional fee (for all the disk space it... doesn't use?). Which means, technically, that my mail is piling up on their servers, and at some point they'll probably figure out some new reason to screw it up.

And let's not pretend the hosting you get after all this hassle is any good. The server is a slow, underpowered shared account somewhere, which means you don't get your own database (have fun sharing a remote MySQL instance with a bunch of other people, suckers!), and you can't run any decent versioning or deployment software. The Apache instance is badly configured (rewrite rules are overridden by their obnoxious 404, among other things). Bandwidth is limited--I have never seen slower transfers than on GoDaddy, and my SFTP connection often drops when updating the site. It's a lot of fun debugging a WordPress theme (already not the speediest of pages) when your updates get stuck in a background window.

I don't write a lot of posts like this, because I've got better things to do with my time these days than complain about poor service somewhere. There's a lot of repulsive companies out there, and while I believe in shame-and-blame actions, there's only so many hours in the day. I'm trying to have a positive outlook. But it is rare that you find something that's so awful you can't think of a single redeeming quality, and GoDaddy is that company. If you're in the market for any kind of web service, and you haven't already been convinced to go elsewhere, let me add my voice to the chorus. Lifehacker's post on moving away from the company is also a great reference for people who are already customers. I'm probably stuck with them, because Urban Artistry has more important things to worry about than their hosting, but you don't have to be.